He’s the Hanged Man, I thought. The one in the Tarot card.

He was almost exactly as I’d seen him in my vision—pale and slender as bone, beautifully pared—except that his eyes were closed and his hair was not flame, only red at the roots and mud-colored further down where it had been trampled in the damp and the dirt of the cave floor. He looked asleep, or unconscious.

Kjell squeezed himself to the side of the cave close at hand and gestured for me to approach. “Come closer.”

The ravens were clutching me so hard that I could feel blood trickling beneath the cloth of my fleece sweater. I hissed with pain and shook Penemuel off my arm onto a rock, where she flapped in an ugly broken manner, not trying to fly, just hopelessly distressed. Azazel’s grip on my shoulder was making me twist. I tried to stroke his feathers but he recoiled from me and jumped off onto another boulder, wings half-raised and head darting from side to side.

“It’s alright,” I mumbled. “Keep calm, you two.” Had it been a mistake bringing them in here at all? If they attempted to assume human form they’d be banging their heads off the roof, and if Azazel kicked off with his flaming sword we’d all burn.

But there was nothing I could do to soothe them right now so I worked my way through the rocks to where Loki, or Samyaza, hung. His bonds looked like rawhide, as I’d anticipated. I hoped the serrated blade sheathed beneath my fleece would cut them quickly.

“Where’s the snake?” I asked, squinting up into the shadows.

“Between his legs,” said Kjell with a laugh. “If you want to draw the poison, we’d be happy to watch.”

I had to restrain myself from snarling at him for that crude joke. Loki’s member was admittedly turgid; it hung down toward his navel, the only dark meat amongst all that pallor. And it was more or less at head height as I stood. I wondered how many people had abused him over the centuries and I deliberately averted my face.

Kjell didn’t miss the cold anger in my eyes. “No?” he said. “Blood for you, then?” He reached into the pocket of his Helly Hansen jacket and pulled out something I didn’t recognize; it was perhaps eight inches long and pale brown—bone, I thought, or wood. About half of its length was flattened like a miniature paddle, or a feather, while the other half was a spike.

He used the point to jab hard into Samyaza’s inner thigh.

I’d been wondering how they managed to pierce angelic flesh. This was some relic, I assumed—like the Nails of the True Cross—though I couldn’t imagine exactly what right now. Blood welled out and ran earthward, a long crimson tear that trickled into the foxy curls at his groin and then spilt out in a line down his belly. My gorge rose.

Oh God. It’s always blood with these people. Blood carries intent. It carries vision. It carries power. It is communion with the Divine.

‘Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.’

You bastards. You piece-of-shit bastards.

Kjell stepped back, licking the tip of the dart. “Help yourself.”

What does he expect me to do? There’s no cup to catch this poison. Does he think I’m going to lick it off Loki’s skin?

I knelt down on the damp floor, crouching low so I was almost face-to-inverted-face with the captive. Cautiously I laid my hand on his breastbone and felt the kick of the heart beneath. His skin was cold, and pale enough to make my hand look dark. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a naked man with so little body-hair; he was almost eerily smooth. The red runnel tracked slowly down over his stomach and ribs, inching toward his nipple.

“It’s me,” I whispered, taking his thin face between my hands. I had to risk his name, and hope it would not be overheard. “Do you know me, Samyaza?”

His eyes opened, moss-green with pupils shrunk to pinpoints, like he was staring into a bright light. The blood-line was almost at his shoulder. Soon it would start to drip on the floor.

“Milja?” His voice was the crackle of ice in winter trees. “No…”

“It’s alright. It’s going to be okay.”

“Don’t let it go to waste!” Kjell instructed anxiously. He grabbed the hair at the base of my hat and shoved my face at Samyaza’s chest; I had to twist wildly to stop my lips planting in the blood.

There came a metallic sound and Egan’s voice, hard and harsh; “That’s enough of that.”

As Kjell let go I looked over my shoulder and saw that Egan had drawn his pistol and was pointing it at Kjell’s head.

“Step away,” he ordered.

The entourage of men who had piled into the cave at our heels, the ones with the axes, all gradually started to realize that something was going wrong and stirred like bears waking themselves. Egan obviously didn’t like having them at his back, and gestured tightly with the muzzle of the Beretta at Kjell; “Move over this way. Milja, get cutting.”

“This is how you repay hospitality?” Kjell demanded, as I unsheathed my knife.

Aslaug was still singing, like she hadn’t even noticed.

I stood up beside Samyaza as you’d stand beside a hanging sheep carcass, and began to saw the leather cords that bound his wrists at the small of his back. It was an awkward angle, even though I didn’t have to worry about slicing his skin, and I was trying to keep half an eye on what was going on with Egan—attempting to get his back to a niche so no one could jump him—and Kjell—moving reluctantly around—and the guys unsheathing their axes. I was desperately hoping the two Watchers would just sit tight for a moment so that we could avoid a bloodbath. I was trying to get though the cords as fast as possible. My forehead was jammed against Samyaza’s cold thigh as I sawed wildly.

“This is our holy place,” Kjell said. “Desecrators!”

The lead guard lurched forward, lifting his weapon. Egan swung his arm around, shot him clean through the middle of the head, and had the gun back to cover Kjell in one brutally effective motion. The muzzle report was so loud in this confined place that almost everyone recoiled; I nearly fell backward over a rock in my shock.

“You move again and your priest dies too,” said Egan flatly. “Back the hell off. You: tell them!”

Kjell hunched his shoulders.

“Ta ravnene!” Samyaza cried, as the gut-cord parted at his wrists.

There was a sudden movement from the shadows. Egan was so focused on splitting his attention between the lone man and the group that he’d discounted the old woman lurking among the rocks; now her staff shot out and smacked down hard on his wrist. The gun flew free and bounced off a boulder, and both men dove for it, spilling at our feet. Aslaug threw off her cloak.

I was right—she was naked underneath, or nearly so, and skeletally thin. She had a net draped over either shoulder, and she threw the first one over the perched raven closest to her.

I braced myself for an enraged angel erupting out of the bird and the net. It didn’t happen. The second raven tried to take off, wings laboring, but seemed weighted by lead and only made it into mid-air before the other net brought it down to smack hard against the rock surface.

“Azazel!” I croaked, stunned. “Penemuel!” The birds were struggling beneath the brown cords of the nets, but seemed unable to rise or escape. Then I lost sight of them altogether as a wave of men poured over the rocks on top of us.

I think Egan got the gun—certainly at least one shot went off, but someone body-slammed me so that I went heels-over-head and ended up crumpled on the floor, my skull bouncing off something so hard that for a moment I blacked out, I think. Rough hands pulling at me and hauling me upright was the next thing I was aware of.

Kjell was screaming. With rage, I mean. “Samle opp blodet!” he was shouting over and over again. I had no idea what was happening anymore; everyone seemed focused on Samyaza’s body, which was awash with crimson, blood spilling down over his chest and face and going to waste on the rocks below.

He’s hurt? How?

Men were trying to catch the blood in their cupped hands, soak it up in their fleece hats, suck it from their fingers.

Then I saw Samyaza’s hands, still clenched around the slim wooden dart that had been used to prick his leg. Kjell must have dropped it when he fought with Egan. His hands free at last, thanks to me, Samyaza had picked it up and thrust it under his breastbone.

What? What?!

“Azazel,” I gasped in terror. “Penemuel?”

Then I was pitched forward in front of the skinniest pair of shins and the dirtiest feet that I’d ever seen.

Aslaug.

She was standing holding the ravens, each long net knotted shut to make a crude bag, one bag in each hand. The birds looked crumpled, their struggles feeble. She bared her teeth at me in a mirthless yellow grin and cocked her head as if to mime, These what you’re looking for?

I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.

‘It will end in death,’ Raphael had said. ‘If you go down there, I will not interfere. You are on your own.’

Then someone grabbed my hair from behind.

“Motherfuckers,” said Kjell, leaning in so close that I could feel his spittle on my cheek. He swung me around and I glimpsed Egan, pinned down in a chokehold by two guys. “Now you are going to watch him die,” he told me. “Drep ham.”

I panicked.

And I called on the only person left that I thought might have the power to interfere on my behalf. I didn’t know if he could hear me down in this sealed prison or whether he could find the way in—but if anyone could, it had be the one who’d sealed it in the first place.

“Uriel!” I howled. “Please!”

The archangel came, with a thump of silver light that felt thrillingly cold against my skin, as if he’d been walking among the stars. He wore a long trench-coat of grey herringbone weave, and a hat that shadowed his eyes. He stood in the center of that chaotic scene as if he were waiting for his carriage to pick him up from amid a crowd of brawling urchins.

Everyone froze. Except me; I knelt up so I could look him in the face. And Aslaug, who fell to her knees, gasping, “Óðinn!”

“Really, Milja?” he asked, looking down at me with bemusement.

“Can you see what they’re doing?” I gabbled. “To your brother? To one of your own kind? Is that really okay with you?”

He cast a glance around the cave which came to rest on Samyaza’s body. His mouth pursed, tightening until it almost vanished altogether, as the scene sank in. I saw realization dawn, and even though it was what I wanted, it made me feel sick with shame.

Uriel really doesn’t like humans much, at the best of times.

He took one pace, stooped, dropped a hand on both me and Egan and stepped out of that cave, dragging us along with him. For a moment we were in that familiar airless no-space between the folds of reality; the next we were outside, in daylight, on snow.

Uriel released us and took a step back. His haughty face was twisted up like I’d never seen before, and there was blue light streaming from inside his mouth and the blanks of his eyes.

“Ahh, God Almighty,” gasped Egan as the cold hit him. He was only wearing indoor clothes, after all, and there was blood on his face. I grabbed his arm to lend him my warmth as I stared around us. The archangel hadn’t taken us far. We were near the research station, but well outside the perimeter fences. I could see in the mid-distance those dull little buildings that looked like nothing dramatic could ever happen there.

Then Uriel lifted his hand, and behind him the black face of the mountain detached itself from Svartfjell and slid down with a roar to bury the site. Thousands of tons of rock and ice; a hammer-blow from Heaven. A great fog-bank of snow billowed down the valley, but settled to the ground before it engulfed us. We felt only the cold blast of its breath.

I didn’t scream. The noise died in my throat. I couldn’t even breathe until the silence returned.

“Rocks fall,” said Egan faintly. “Everyone dies.”

‘Everybody dies. Everybody.’ Azazel had said that to me a long time ago. Oh God, Uriel—you are not allowed to do that! You are Loyal, old-school Loyal—You can’t kill, not without permission! You’ve just killed them all. Haven’t you?

All of them.

“We are not livestock!” Uriel snarled. “We are Sons of Heaven, not battery hens for your filthy gratifications! How dare you? HOW DARE YOU?” His voice boomed around the valley heads like thunder. He was shaking as he drew himself up, trying to uncrook his fingers, and it was hard to tell if he was talking to us, or himself, or some unseen audience. “And now the Serpent will starve and die. But that’s better. Better that he perish forever than be used for such sins. I will stand by that. We were not made for such wretched degradations. That was not part of the Plan. It was not. I have made my judgement.”

Oh my God. Azazel.

I saw myself as if from a distance, launching myself out of Egan’s arms and at Uriel. My nails clawed at his face without making any more impression than gaining his perplexed attention. I swung my fist back and punched him in the eye as hard as I could—but it was like punching a brick wall. The shock of the blow traveled all the way up to my elbow and nearly knocked my shoulder out of its socket. I screamed, knowing that the terrible numbness in my hand and wrist was going to be pain any second now.

Uriel put a palm on my face and pushed me over into the snow. I stopped screaming because I had no breath for it; the pain had caught up and was too enormous.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded, sounding hurt. “I saved you, didn’t I? It’s what you wanted! Where’s your gratitude?”

I felt Egan grab me, cradling me there in the snow. “Ah, Milja,” he muttered. “What the hell d’you do that for? You’ve broken your hand there!”

“He’s won,” I gasped. “He doesn’t even know it, the bastard. Oh fuck, Egan. Oh. Oh. He’s won. It’s over.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“Won?” Uriel asked suspiciously.

I suppose I should have kept him in ignorance, but I didn’t care anymore. “You buried them all!”

“Yes…?”

“All three. Azazel. Samyaza. Penemuel.”

“…Penemuel?” he echoed, all the thunder and the wrath vanished from his voice.

“That’s it. It’s over, isn’t it? You got what you wanted, you shits.”

Uriel took a few steps sideways, then turned and paced back, his tweed overcoat swirling restlessly. “You’re saying the Fallen were there too?”

“The ravens, you eejit,” Egan snapped, trying to pad my hand with only a woolen hat for bandaging.

I saw Uriel’s face drop, and thought that the Fall from Heaven itself could not have been longer, or crushed an angel so completely. He went gray as a corpse. “No,” he whispered. “Penemuel…”

In the midst of my pain and my rage, I saw. Uriel was never any good at masking his feelings, let’s face it. Suddenly a whole lot of things made sense: the treasure-trail to Lalibela; the unholy bargain with Roshana.

Oh. I had no idea!

As Uriel shook his head and vanished, Egan hauled me to my feet. “Time to go,” he said firmly, but then stared over my head. “What the—?”

Uriel hadn’t gone far; not even out of sight. He was stooped over the avalanche debris where the buildings had stood, digging with his bare hands. And because he wasn’t human-sized anymore—he was maybe thirty, forty feet tall now—his desperation was only too obvious.

“It was always about Penemuel,” I said weakly. “He wants her. He arranged for me to free her. Now he’s trying to get her back.”

“What? What for?”

“I think…he likes her.”

“You have to be pulling my chain.”

“Uh-uh.” I’d seen it in Uriel’s face. I could see it now, writ large on his colossal features.

“Ah grand.” Egan hitched an arm around my ribs to support me.

Azazel’s down there too. I licked my dry lips. “We have to go over there.”

Egan let out a breath, but he didn’t argue. “Sure we do.”

He marched me across the shattered landscape, through the smashed fences, wading drifts of snow and broken rock. It was hard, hard going. I clutched my injured arm to my side and tried to make the pain go away by ignoring it. At every step my wrist throbbed with heat, swelling.

Azazel. We’re coming.

By the time we got there Uriel had dug half a dozen craters and abandoned each. As we drew to a halt, panting with exertion, and I slid out of Egan’s grasp onto my knees and plunged my broken hand into a snowdrift to numb it, Uriel looked over at us wildly. “I can’t tell where they are!” he cried, his eyes midnight blue and his long coat billowing with darkness. “I can’t see any of them!”

Well I can’t either! Maybe if I slept I could dream them…

I looked down at the snow. Blood from my split knuckles had soaked through the makeshift bandage, leaving a red mitten-shaped print. I remembered my vision.

“Here,” I said, pointing at the snow in front of my knees. “Right here.”

Uriel stomped up, towering over us. Even looking up at him made me feel dizzy. There is no difference between gods and giants, I thought, as if I hadn’t known that already.

“Here?” he demanded, but didn’t wait for confirmation. Egan had to haul me bodily to a safe distance, my heels furrowing the snow. As the archangel started digging, that ‘safe’ distance kept growing bigger. With more haste than precision he scooped snow and rocks to either side, and as the hole got deeper other things emerged too, flung aside as trash—lengths of girder and fragments of wood cladding and then, ugh, crushed and floppy rags of humanity. All discarded.

“You don’t have to look,” Egan muttered as I buried my face in his chest.

By the time Uriel paused he’d excavated what looked like a quarry. He scrabbled around among the rocks at the bottom, searching the gaps between slabs the size of cars. Then he leapt out with a triumphant cry.

My heart turned over. He had a net in each hand, and inside each was a crumpled black bird that looked far too small for the swathes of ugly brown thonging. Those were nets designed to hold something human-sized. The strands looked like leather. He thrust them both out at me, and I saw avian eyes flicker open.

They’re alive! Why can’t they—Oh. The nets. Like Samyaza’s bonds. Like the ones that held Azazel for so many years. Nephilim skin and flesh. I thought of Roshana’s body, which I’d last seen carried off by Michael, but by this point I was already too nauseous to feel anything more.

Raphael had warned me, of course. He’d told me it was a trap, in almost those words. The Norwegians had been forewarned and forearmed and we’d walked straight into it.

“Which one?” Uriel demanded. “Which one’s her?”

He can’t tell. Shaking, I peered at their eyes, searching for a glimpse of silver or gold. “That one,” I said, pointing at the raven on the left.

Uriel smiled, and not in a kindly manner. “Do you think I can’t smell your lies?” he said, and lobbed the other one into the snow at our feet. “Open it.”

Bastard, I thought, but I was in no position to argue. I saw the other raven, the one still in Uriel’s grasp, try to peck him through the mesh, and my heart clenched. I looked at Egan, who had the advantage of two functional hands. Surely Penemuel free was better than no one free at all?

The raven at our toes croaked weakly, its beak open to pant.

“Why do you want her?” Egan asked grimly.

“Open it,” Uriel growled, and the ground trembled under our feet as if another avalanche were on its way.

Egan looked at me and I nodded, so he stooped and began to pull at the big knot. I put my good hand on his shoulder, and Uriel backed off several giant paces—I guess he wasn’t as confident as he pretended to be.

The rawhide thonging was horrible stuff, but Egan had strong hands; eventually he forced the knots free and threw back the net, and we both lurched back as the raven fluttered, tumbled, then flapped up into the air. Egan threw me down flat in the snow, as if the bird were a grenade with the pin out.

Poor raven. It must have let the angel inside voluntarily, but I don’t imagine it had expected things to end this way. Penemuel exploded out of its body in a shower of feather-fragments and bloody rain, stretching to match Uriel for size; a raging goddess of flame with pinions of molten bronze, hands outstretched at the archangel, lips drawn back from savage teeth.

“Wait, Penemuel, we have to talk,” said Uriel, falling back.

“GIVE HIM TO ME!” she howled, lunging at him.

“Wait! Just listen!” Uriel stumbled backward, dodging the slash of her claws. “Penemuel!”

“GIVE HIM!”

It would almost have looked comical; the way he was trying to run backward, flinching from her reach; the way she’d completely lost all restraint and transformed into a ravening fury barely holding to human shape; fighting over a mere bird. If they hadn’t been forty feet tall, that is, and both splattered in the blood of their victims. If they hadn’t between them been responsible for so many, many deaths.

Then Penemuel drew a sword of golden flame out of the air and I think Uriel finally realized that she wasn’t willing to negotiate.

So he stuffed the net holding Azazel into his mouth, swallowed hard and vanished as he fell backward.

Penemuel launched herself after him and disappeared too.

In a microsecond, silence had reclaimed the landscape.

Actually, I think I may have lost the power of hearing. I could see Egan’s lips moving; he was speaking to me urgently, but I couldn’t hear a word and he seemed to be receding from me as darkness crowded in from the edges of my vision.

Is this what death is like? I wondered. I couldn’t even feel horror anymore; my anguish was so vast that I’d lost sight of its margins. Or maybe I was shrinking instead, dwindling like a candle about to be snuffed out.

“Milja! Milja!”

I was face-down in the snow and it was the chill that brought me back, I think, as much as Egan’s voice. For a moment it felt burning cold against my cheek. Then Egan plucked me up, pulling me against him. He kissed my face, my lips—and his mouth felt like fire; my senses were all over the place.

It took me a long moment to catch my breath and focus my eyes.

“Feckssake. You alright, Milja? You okay?” He shook me rather less gently than I’d have liked. “Stay awake!”

“I’m…” I’m not all right. How can I be? “Azazel’s dead.”

“I doubt that.”

“Uriel ate him.”

“Azazel threatened to eat him, remember? And it didn’t sound like that would be the end of it. I don’t think you can kill an angel that easily.”

Yes, I remembered. Back in the monastery, Azazel had promised to tear Uriel into pieces and devour him. ‘Is that how you want to spend eternity?’ he’d asked.

I nodded, dumbly. So far as we knew, the only sure ways to kill an angel were isolation, or—and we were largely guessing this from Penemuel’s near-miss with the spear of Saint George—a blooded relic through the heart. “Samyaza,” I mumbled.

“What about him?”

“He might still be alive, if that’s true.”

Egan sucked his dry lips. “Look, I don’t know what was going on in there…but I think Samyaza might have betrayed us.”

“That’s why I’m going to make him help us.”

Egan held my gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. He can’t be far away from where the ravens were. Aslaug was standing right next to him, wasn’t she?”

I couldn’t remember, to be honest. But that wasn’t going to stop me. The land of the frost-giants wasn’t going to stop me; a broken hand wasn’t going to stop me. Heaven itself would have to stop me.

Slowly, carefully, we climbed down into the pit Uriel had dug, through the layers of death, into the jumble of boulders and clefts at the bottom. We searched for bodies, and found more than we ever wanted. It was Egan, face down beneath an overhang, who discovered Samyaza at last. His bound ankles, anyway.

He pulled out his own hunting knife and slithered most of his upper body into the darkness, while I held on to his ankle to make sure he didn’t freeze to death. When he inched out again, he was pulling Samyaza’s body after him. It took both of us to heave him free of the rocks; lucky for us the angel was such a slender man.

He didn’t seem to have been physically damaged by the rock-fall, but he wasn’t conscious even though he’d been cut completely free now. The winter sunshine touched his pale skin for the first time in millennia, and he looked damn near as white as the snow.

The only thing that mattered to me was that he was breathing. “Still alive,” I said. “He missed his heart.”

Egan grasped the bloody spike still jutting from beneath his ribcage and pulled it out. He slapped Samyaza’s face, but it provoked no response.

“What the hell is that thing?” I asked, leaning against a rock.

“A mistletoe dart, I imagine.”

“Right. Okay.” My words sounded slurred; I was at the limits of exhaustion, I realized, and my arm hurt so much that I could feel it lighting up the world like a beacon.

What if Raphael drops back to see how things went? Oh God.

“What do you want us to do with him?” Egan panted, prodding the body with his boot. “I’m sorry, Milja, I don’t think I can get us all out of here. Not over the mountains. We’re a bit screwed really.”

I slithered down onto my knees, staring into Samyaza’s slack face. It was love that roused angels, in my experience, but I had no love to give him. Just a stone-cold determination that he would not die on me. You’re not dead, I told him. You’re not dead until you’ve been forgotten. You’re not dead until nobody cares about you anymore. You might try to kill yourself, but there’s no escape that way, not while your heart beats and cries out for love. Not while you have your cultists and your online fans and your scholars. Not while I’m holding you here. You might have withered down to almost nothing, you might have fled as far as you can from all the pain and the humiliation, but there is no escape. That’s the punishment God decreed. You are immortal.

I bent over his still face and covered his mouth with mine.

I knew what it was to have a Watcher spirit possess me. I knew how it felt to open up and be entered.

This time I deliberately drew Samyaza in. Deep into my lungs, into my heart, into the darkness of my core.

And this time, I did black out.